Photograph by Chris Ahrens

Taz, a former Skinhead, is featured on the God n Gangsters YouTube channel and is now the pastor of Set Free Church in San Diego.

The painter Michael Cassidy is either the least or most practical person I know. Least in that he doesn’t measure success in terms of money; most in that he is deeply concerned with the effect his art has on the public.

As he puts it, “Art with real meaning that speaks to people’s hearts has to have something to say about what is true. Most of you have had moments of magic in your life. Moments we grasp at but can never seem to capture and hold onto. They’re fleeting — brief looks from the mountaintop through foggy glasses. Artists help us pause and look for those moments. I paint pictures of paradise” — Tahiti, for example — “so that when I look at them, I’m reminded of what I was made for. Somewhere in my soul, I know beyond a doubt that I’m made for paradise, for heaven. I make pictures of horse Indian culture and cowboys because it reminds me of the wildness and freedom that is also heaven.” Lifting his brush skyward, he hopes his paintings provide a glance at heavenly things to come.

This attitude puts him completely out of step with materialistic, modern thought; as he notes, “I’m a non-person in the modern art world.” He sums up his neo-bohemian/Christian philosophy this way: “If I have to choose between the opportunity of selling a painting or fishing, you’ll know where to find me.”

Despite this, he is successful in his work, often selling his paintings — representational, figurative, reflective of a creation that points him toward the creator — for up to $40,000. He meticulously puts oil on canvas one stroke at a time, stretches his canvases by hand, and hand builds his own frames.

Cassidy is a close friend of mine, and it’s probably not surprising to learn that a man who labors in a craft birthed long before the Industrial Revolution is something of a fellow technophobe. He owns a cell phone, but intentionally loses it, and refuses to be interrupted by such trivia as retrieving a phone message or sending a text.

As for me, I am a faithful member of the incredible shrinking tribe who vow to live and die on print’s sacred hill, and I long for the days of my old IBM Selectric typewriter. What is surprising is that Cassidy is the person who suggested that I, a fellow Luddite, take the plunge into the digital deep of YouTube.

About five years ago, sick of a ramen diet supplemented by the dandelions I picked from backyard, I called Cassidy to ask how I might make a better living through writing. He thought for a minute, and then suggested I write a book about the penitent gangsters I knew.

“How do I make money on that?” I asked.

“You don’t, you give it away,” was his reply.

He paid for the first printing, and six months later, God & Gangsters, 21 Tales from Gangland rolled off the presses. To this day, nobody has ever paid a dime for that book. Cassidy, like many among the faithful, believed I would be rewarded for my sacrifice. He put feet to faith, sending me checks from time to time, always assuring me of rewards in the next life. I confess to being skeptical, until, seemingly out of nowhere, I was hired to write three books for three different people. These full-length biographies paid well and led to my most profitable year ever.

When the money from book sales dried up several years later, I called Cassidy again, to ask what he recommended I do next. “Start a YouTube channel,” he suggested before hanging up. I was incredulous. Didn’t he realize I had only recently learned how to send a photo with my phone? But with no work on the horizon and nothing to lose, I determined to follow his advice.

A few days later, I emerged from my so-called office, having given birth, painfully, to God n Gangsters. As I put it in my welcome video, “God n Gangsters reveals tales of the rise, fall, and redemption of some of America’s most daring criminals. We talk to them ourselves, bringing you along in the dark rooms, back alleys, and prison cells, plunging deep into their stories. They lived hard, they survived the fall, and now they have a story and a warning shot for you, your children, and your grandchildren.”

The Breakthrough with Big Al

After a few dozen lackluster postings, I contacted Mongol Motorcycle Club co-founder “Big” Al Aceves via Facebook. I had never met Al before, but he agreed to be interviewed. During our two hour and 21 minute conversation, he recounted his violent past, including his time as Airborne Infantry in Vietnam, where he psychotically cut the ears off his enemies, slicing their throats and carving his name on their chests before leaving them to decompose in the jungle.

Upon his discharge, Aceves returned to the U.S. and sought to fill the adrenaline gap left by civilian life. It was then that he helped found one of America’s most notorious motorcycle clubs, the Mongols. As an enforcer for the club, Aceves terrorized anyone who got in his way or owed him or the club money. According to Big Al, “I once whipped a guy with a chain; took half his face off. And I have no idea how many guys I’ve stabbed. I’m not making excuses, but I was numb from using heroin for nearly 35 years.”

After gagging my way through the bloody details of the gangster portion of Al’s life, I was relieved when the kinder, gentler God portion began. He told how he had gone from crime to faith, and from faith to service: to his friends, family, and the homeless people he now cares for on a nearly daily basis. Big Al’s story was the hit that launched the God n Gangsters channel: it received 26,863 views in a single day.

Murph the Surf

Other God n Gangsters stories include that of Jack “Murph the Surf” Murphy, the young surfing champion out of Florida who, in 1964, pulled off the biggest jewel heist in history. Murph made international headlines after breaking into the New York Museum of Natural History and liberating 23 of the world’s most precious stones from the J.P. Morgan Gem Collection. The rock star of the collection, The Star of India, is the most valuable star sapphire in the world, and it wound up being carried by Jack like a two-dollar rabbit’s foot in his pants pocket. Wanting to show off to his friend, famed jazz musician Gene Krupa, Murph bragged, “Man, you’ll never guess what I’ve got in my pocket.” Decades later, I accompanied Murphy into Donovan State Prison and he told me of his years of living dangerously before his miraculous conversion.

Crips & Bloods

Timothy Jackson was once a highly respected member of the Deep Valley Crips. Now, he is the equally well-respected business owner of Quality Touch Cleaning. Hailing from Oceanside, Jackson was jumped into the gang at age 14. By his mid 20s, he was eight years, eight months, and eight days into a 13-year sentence for attempted murder. When he was paroled on February 23, 2017, some fading tattoos were the only remaining evidence of Jackson’s violent roots. Even the officer who helped put him away years ago remarked, “I can’t believe this is the same person I once arrested.”

Jackson, who went by the street moniker “Baby G-Man,” spent much of his youth planning attacks against his gang’s biggest rival, the Deep Valley Bloods. Atiu “Joe” Taulau, whose crazy ways earned him the moniker Maniak from his fellow Bloods, remembers Jackson well from those days of blood and bullets. According to Taulau, “Timothy’s name rang bells like a church on Sunday. I didn’t want to see him breathing, and he didn’t want to see me breathing.” According to Jackson, “Joe was younger than me, and he’d drive by, and flash a “B” with his fingers from the car his older brother was driving. I knew we had to take care of him right then, or we would have to take care of him later.”

Both Taulau and Jackson recall being shot at by their rivals in the ongoing wars that raged in the area. According to Joe, “When you hear that sound, and know the bullets are close, that’s scary. But it wasn’t until I first got incarcerated that it hit home for me. I watched my best friend and my youngest brother get broken off with life sentences, and I realized that prison was not for me. I don’t think it’s for anybody. You call home on Christmas, and you hear the party going on. I wasn’t there when my youngest daughter was born. Hearing that baby talk over the phone; that hits a place in your heart.”

Jackson recalls the time he got up to answer a phone and a shotgun blasted a hole in the chair he had been occupying just moments earlier. According to him, “That would have killed me, but it didn’t slow me down at all. It wasn’t until after my last arrest that I realized that even if I were to serve life in prison, I wasn’t going to do it gang banging. That’s when the big changes began in my life.” One of those changes occurred when he was visited by La Jolla entrepreneur Mark Bowles, part of a group known as “The Five Ventures.” In a Shark Tank-type contest, Jackson took second place for his proposal regarding unique ways of sanitizing highly trafficked business areas. Upon Jackson’s release from prison, Bowles aided and mentored the former gang member so that he could start his cleaning business.

The gang feuds continue in and around Oceanside’s Deep Valley, but both Jackson and Taulau are now at peace with each other. An ex-Blood and ex-Crip have done the unthinkable by joining forces to work for a common goal. They are both mentors at Resilience, a youth mentoring program for at-risk kids, based in Oceanside and run by another former Deep Valley Crip featured on God n Gangsters, Pastor Larry Sauls.

According to Sauls, “I was a good kid, but after I got jumped on my way to school, another kid helped me out. When I saw him getting jumped a while later, what do you think I was gonna do? I had to help him. Later, I was recruited by the gang at the Boys & Girls Club. I had my first son while I was still in high school, and by my 21st birthday, I was married, and on my way to serving a 13- year prison term.”

Pastor Larry believes that the biggest problem facing youth today is absentee fathers. His latest effort, “Improving Fatherhood Project North County, seeks to encourage dads to step up and take responsibility for their families. Besides that, he splits his time between working as the Senior Pastor at Atmosphere of Faith Christian Church in Vista, being an attentive husband and father of six, and serving as the Program Supervisor for Resilience.

Mexican Mafia

Another God n Gangsters video concerns “big homie” prison legend and Mexican Mafia co-founder Donald “Big D” Garcia. Garcia was a convicted killer, a prison boxing champion, and a heroin addict for decades. After his release, however, he turned his energies to stopping crimes rather that instigating them. After spending years working with law enforcement to helping curtail gang activity in the Los Angeles area, Big D passed away in 2012.

Manson’s Righthand Man

Not a gangster by strict definition, Charles “Tex” Watson is serving a life sentence in San Diego’s Donovan State Prison for crimes that would sicken even the most violent gangster. Considered Charles Manson’s righthand man, Watson once slaughtered seven strangers with a knife, including the pregnant actress Sharon Tate. According to Watson, “Once I came down from the drugs I had been taking, I began to see the horror of what I had done. Sometimes at night I would have visions of blood and Charlie [Manson] and the desert and knives. When that happened, the prisoners would call for the guards because I would be going crazy in my cell, throwing myself against the bars and screaming. I couldn’t eat, and my weight dropped from my usual 165 to 110. I was on suicide watch and would be bound in a cot with four-point restraints, both ankles and wrists. As I lay on my back, the words of the 23rd Psalm which I had heard as a child, began to run through my head. Eventually, through study of the Bible, I learned that the penalty had been paid, even for guilt and sin as gross as mine.”

Market the Mousetrap

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

For most of my life, I had taken Emerson’s proverb to heart; the result was that I ended up with hundreds of what I considered better mousetraps in my garage. It was my neighbor Curt Conant who showed me that the world was done with path-beating; now, you have to beat the path and tell the world about your creation.

It was a year to the day since its inception when God n Gangsters finally slow-dripped its way to 1000 subscribers, which is the minimum amount YouTube requires in order for a channel to become monetized. We were growing, slowly but steadily. That started to change on June 3 of last year, when Conant started working the algorithms. I still don’t know what an algorithm is, and I really don’t care. I’m satisfied with Conant’s explanation: “I turn the dials that get YouTube to put your videos on the ‘dessert tray’ for viewers.” He often adds, “You make the paintings, I get them in front of customers” — and once again, I find myself thinking of God n Gangsters in connection with Michael Cassidy’s art. Since Conant came on board, God n Gangsters has multiplied both views and subscriptions by a factor of five, and the channel now averages around $1000 per month in ad revenue.

Telling stories with a camera

Michael Cassidy writes that “if you had a pie chart that represented what a fully developed artist looked like, it would have small slices of natural talent and huge slices of self-discipline, hard work, desire, and stubborn determination.” Anyone who’s spent any amount of time on YouTube knows that there are huge variances in quality, and just getting your work on the dessert tray isn’t enough. You have to work to make a compelling product, the same way I had to work on good sentences and solid stories when I was banging away on my IBM Selectric. That’s why I’m glad I had Dina Treibel to help me learn how to better film and edit my interviews.

Dina and her husband Paul have deep backgrounds in film. She began as a news anchor in Guam. Paul worked behind the camera for the same TV station. Today, she works as the film studies and multimedia teacher at the Grauer School in Encinitas, and runs Treibel Productions on the side. She is enthusiastic about the egalitarian possibilities presented by new media. “Anybody with a cell phone can start a YouTube channel,” she says — but there’s still that matter of standing out. “A lot of my students already have channels, but my goal is to help them become better at filming and editing. I introduce them to the work of some of the better filmmakers, and suggest they learn from them and apply these proven techniques. Wes Anderson, for instance, has a style that can be recognized as his own immediately. One former student of mine, Will Fallmer, won the 2019 iVIE (Innovative Video in Education) Award in the category “Healthy Teen Relationships” after he adapted Wes Anderson’s style to his assignment. The concept seems straightforward enough, but Will was able to put a new spin on it.”

Dodgers2080

Tim Rogers has been a Dodger fan ever since watching his first Major League Baseball game in 1973, at age eight. (He can’t help it. He grew up in Los Angeles before being transplanted to San Diego.) As a self-proclaimed baseball fanatic, it was natural for Rogers to eventually begin reporting on the sport. In 2018, he became a writer for the website DodgerNation, which led to his starting the YouTube channel Dodgers2080. “2080 is a term used by scouts to rate players,” he explains. “Twenty’s not good, and eighty’s great. I have good access to all the players on the Quakes, one of the teams that Dodgers prospects play on. I sit in the dugout near them during the games, and they’re really accepting of me. I film them and put them on my site, and they share the interviews with their families, some of which are thousands of miles away. That’s one reason I do this; to help the players connect with their families. It’s a labor of love.

“The prospects are paid $500 a week, plus housing. A lot of them are from Venezuela. Quite a few are from the Dominican Republic and Cuba, and a few are from Mexico. But only about five to ten players will ever play in the Major Leagues, even for a short time. Two of prospects who made it that I’ve gotten to know are Darien Nunez from Mexico, and Miguel Vargas from Cuba.”

Rogers has learned this much in the algorithmic trenches: “It’s helpful to use a name like Vargas’s. In your video descriptions, the algorithm won’t go to 1000th word, so you need to put your keywords closer to the front. If you begin your description with, ‘At the baseball stadium,’ only ‘At the’ will be counted. So I’ll put a name like ‘Miguel Vargas’ right up front in a description, and then use his name in a hashtag and in the title. He’s one of the top guys, and that causes me to get more views.”

An 11-year-old YouTuber

Eleven-year-old Clairemont resident Lucas Rohfok has been making things ever since he exited infancy. Paper airplanes, newspaper kites, and stomp rockets litter his earliest memories. Today, he is saving the money he makes walking dogs to buy components for a home-built computer. The juxtaposition is apt: Rohfok seems to do a good job of straddling the worlds of technology and the great outdoors. “I’m not really into cell phones,” he says. “I have an Apple Watch, so I can call my parents on it when I need to, but I can’t play games on it. I don’t understand why some people play games on their phones when they’re already playing outside. I can wait to play a computer game when I get home.”

Last summer Lucas started his own YouTube channel, Animal Saver. “I wanted to start a YouTube channel, but I didn’t know what I wanted it to be about. I was looking at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) website where you can donate to the type of animal you want to try and save. I thought, ‘I’m into helping animals,’ so I started Animal Saver. I work on my channel randomly now, but I hope to work on it more soon. I have around 3000 views and around 28 subscribers right now.” He’s also helping his seven-year-old brother Marley start his own YouTube channel about the video game Minecraft.

God N Gangsters

Technology comes more naturally to the young. But it’s not out of reach for the rest of us. Starting a YouTube Channel sounded like fun when I first considered it, and it certainly has been — at times, anyway. It’s also been inexpensive, with minimal paperwork, and easy enough for anyone with more computer knowledge than I have, which means nearly everyone. And when instructions seem inadequate, countless YouTube gurus are just a click away — on YouTube.

Most of the time, God n Gangsters is the most emotionally rewarding project I have ever been involved in. The project seeks to provide a truthful counterbalance to the more glamorous image of gang life sometimes portrayed in pop culture. Any honest former inmate will tell you that prison life alternates between terrifying and boring, and is only glamorous when viewed through the lens of some suburban kid who has yet to earn his first jailhouse beatdown. That kid has no real idea that bad choices made today could lead to death, or life in a cell for 23 hours a day, surrounded by a bunch of angry guys, some of whom want to end your life. But if he finds my YouTube channel, he may learn something. And while the book God & Gangsters has reached thousands, the channel has reached millions. Viewer comments suggest that it is making a difference, that many are tuning in to hear about gangsters who made U-turns, and are now attempting to repair the wreckage of their lives and of those they hurt.

At other times, the work proves so frustrating that I contemplate making twice the amount I make from views by, I dunno, twirling signs. Recently I was putting the finishing touches on a video featuring Anthony Kiedis of The Red Hot Chili Peppers (Kiedis is not now, nor has he ever been a gangster, but he was once a thief and a drug addict. Also, his father was a gangster, so he qualifies for our channel.) I had crammed roughly 24 hours over two days into that video. Then, at 2 am, I pushed a button, and the audio in the editing software disappeared without a trace. Had it been earlier in the day, I would have figured out how to retrieve it, but at that late hour, with sleep deprivation gnawing away at my remaining brain cells, I began having a meltdown. I glared at my laptop, and briefly considered introducing it to the blacktop of my driveway. Within moments, sanity returned, and I began the tedious task of retracing my steps and figuring out how to correct my mistakes. We’ve all been there, right?

Where I haven’t been is where so many young gang members grew up. Many of them can tell you the exact day when the cops broke down the door and took mom away. Others tell of being jumped on the way to school and being sent off to dreamland to the sounds of gunfire. When I consider that, I begin to understand that we who live safely behind our gated communities would react no differently than these individuals have in to face such horror. While we can’t excuse such actions, neither can we condemn those who commit them. God n Gangsters is about revealing such gruesome realities, and the subsequent U-turns some brave people have made to break the chain and not inflict the gang lifestyle on loved ones. It’s about redemption and helping wash clean the streets that have been stained by an enemy’s blood. It’s my attempt to speak to people’s hearts.